The present invention relates to web communication and archiving, particularly to web communication between three or more users.
The emergence and development of computer networks and protocols, including the World Wide Web (or simply “the web”), now allows many remote users to communicate with one another. Different types of communication tools have been developed for the web which allow users to communicate in different ways through a browser. One popular type of communication tool is instant messaging (also called chat). Instant messaging (IM) allows users to communicate over the web in real time. A user uses a client program (called an IM client) that communicates with an instant messaging service over the web. The IM client has a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows a user to input text and view text.
IM communication generally involves typing text. For example, two users chatting may type lines of text in each of their IM client programs. The instant messaging service passes the typed text between the IM clients. The lines of text may resemble a conversation in that successive lines of text are displayed in a temporal sequence along with an indication of the user who typed the text. Often this indication of the user is a display of the user's screen name (also called an IM address). A compilation of these messages exchanged between the users is commonly referred to as a chat. IM clients have historically had simple GUIs with rectangular window displays in which the text of a chat is made to scroll as the conversation proceeds.
Different IM services and IM client programs have different features relating to the chat experience. For example, IM services often provide presence information that indicates whether people on a user's list of contacts are currently online and available to chat. Some IM services also allow a user to set an “online status” or “away message” so that other users are aware of the user's availability to chat. Finally, users can often personalize their profiles to change graphical features associated with their chat. For instance, a user often has a screen name which is displayed to another to identify himself or herself when he or she is chatting. The screen name itself may be selected by the user (or assigned by the IM service). A user may also choose different font colors, font styles, symbols, or personalized images to be displayed along with his or her screen name. An example IM service includes the Google Talk service from Google, Inc. of Mountain View, Calif.
Many existing IM services are limited to communications between only two participants. In these systems, if a first user wishes to interact with more than one other user, the first user must open separate chats with each other user. This requires a user to switch between multiple windows and transfer text from one window to another if the user wants to share information with a user other than the user participating in the chat. Additionally, existing IM services provide only limited archiving capability, if any, and the archives are not easily accessible from multiple locations.
Users need a capability for interacting with more than one other participant in a chat. Such users also need a capability for accessing and searching through their previous chats.